This article is hard to read and the tone is strong, which makes it come off as ranty. This is bad because it seems like it has substantive content that you’ve thought out.
For example, the second paragraph has a few good ideas, but these have been chopped up. This makes it laborious to read:
What do you want from a hiring process? A good hire. Crucially, no bad hire. And for those people whom you haven’t hired to be mostly happy with how things went. Because you care for them.
The issues continues in the third paragraph. Even though the ideas are good, you’re coming across as overbearing. This is distracting, which is especially bad since this paragraph gives the overview/purpose of the article and introduces the key org (Hirely) that you’re talking about.
Sadly, you’re at risk of making a bad hire and disgruntling your other applicants if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, outsourcing isn’t a solution, either, because you don’t know how to judge the actions of those you’re outsourcing to. I will demonstrate this by example of a hiring process I’ve observed as an outsider, in which the hiring firm (call them Hirely) acted in a way that would have seemed sensible to the average founder who knows little about hiring, but to me looked like blundering. Even if you don’t plan to outsource hiring, the following points are worth thinking about.
Other comments:
After this, it seems like there’s with multiple sections of meta (“Added 2022-10-16” and “This is a repurposed article with a history”). These suggest serious misconduct by someone hostile to you, but this is sort of buried.
Terms like “Manager Tools” and “Hirely” are really important to you, but this requires closer reading to figure out what they really mean and most people won’t push past this.
Your views/promotion of Manager Tools seems pretty disjoint about the other issues in this post.
You’ve given each hyperlink it’s own custom tag. This convention/process seems wildly different and seems to make a lot of extra amount of work for you?
A lot of your content is thoughtful and thinks from the perspective of the “users”/”customers”.
It sounds like you have good perspectives, and small tweaks, like a summary up front, would add a lot.
Thanks for taking the time to write up balanced feedback! I was surprised.
I’m starting to understand the message from your and other comments that the tone of the article is distracting from the content and even causing people to misunderstand it. When I write another article, I will take more time to work on the tone.
I knew that the introduction is written in a choppy way, but I didn’t expect that it would be hard to read. Thanks for telling me that. Good point also that I should introduce key terms more explicitly. You pointing this out made me see it as another source of confusion.
One clarification about ‘promoting Manager Tools’: The reason is that I’m using arguments from authority a lot. From the authority of Manager Tools. In order for those arguments to be convincing, I need to establish that Manager Tools is reliable. That’s why I write how their guidance leads to success etc. Now, arguments from authority tend to be weak (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority). If I had the time, I would write out all the arguments properly, gather data etc. But I don’t have the time, unfortunately. Also, it’s not crucial for my main point, particularly my original main point. My original main point is that Hirely does bad work (they’re hopefully doing better now – that’s why I half-assedly repurposed the article) and one can be convinced of that without being convinced by each and every sub-point.
As to the summary up-front: Recently I try to structure articles in a way that the title and the table of contents can be read as the summary. In this article this got lost a bit because of the repurposing.
This article is hard to read and the tone is strong, which makes it come off as ranty. This is bad because it seems like it has substantive content that you’ve thought out.
For example, the second paragraph has a few good ideas, but these have been chopped up. This makes it laborious to read:
The issues continues in the third paragraph. Even though the ideas are good, you’re coming across as overbearing. This is distracting, which is especially bad since this paragraph gives the overview/purpose of the article and introduces the key org (Hirely) that you’re talking about.
Other comments:
After this, it seems like there’s with multiple sections of meta (“Added 2022-10-16” and “This is a repurposed article with a history”). These suggest serious misconduct by someone hostile to you, but this is sort of buried.
Terms like “Manager Tools” and “Hirely” are really important to you, but this requires closer reading to figure out what they really mean and most people won’t push past this.
Your views/promotion of Manager Tools seems pretty disjoint about the other issues in this post.
You’ve given each hyperlink it’s own custom tag. This convention/process seems wildly different and seems to make a lot of extra amount of work for you?
A lot of your content is thoughtful and thinks from the perspective of the “users”/”customers”.
It sounds like you have good perspectives, and small tweaks, like a summary up front, would add a lot.
Thanks for taking the time to write up balanced feedback! I was surprised.
I’m starting to understand the message from your and other comments that the tone of the article is distracting from the content and even causing people to misunderstand it. When I write another article, I will take more time to work on the tone.
I knew that the introduction is written in a choppy way, but I didn’t expect that it would be hard to read. Thanks for telling me that. Good point also that I should introduce key terms more explicitly. You pointing this out made me see it as another source of confusion.
One clarification about ‘promoting Manager Tools’: The reason is that I’m using arguments from authority a lot. From the authority of Manager Tools. In order for those arguments to be convincing, I need to establish that Manager Tools is reliable. That’s why I write how their guidance leads to success etc. Now, arguments from authority tend to be weak (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority). If I had the time, I would write out all the arguments properly, gather data etc. But I don’t have the time, unfortunately. Also, it’s not crucial for my main point, particularly my original main point. My original main point is that Hirely does bad work (they’re hopefully doing better now – that’s why I half-assedly repurposed the article) and one can be convinced of that without being convinced by each and every sub-point.
The hyperlink thing is to comply with my own demand from an old LessWrong post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ytStDZ7BaC23GvGPb/please-give-your-links-speaking-names It wasn’t that much extra work because I wrote a little Clojure script to transform one Markdown file into another.
As to the summary up-front: Recently I try to structure articles in a way that the title and the table of contents can be read as the summary. In this article this got lost a bit because of the repurposing.